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Chapter 3: Close Your Eyes and Try to Catch Him

Sex is meaningful only when out of lust, love is born. Love is meaningful only when out of love, prayer is born. If your sex remains just sexuality, a circular repetition, a mechanical thing that you go on doing, then you will remain meaningless. Because sex is your energy; it has to be transformed. It is very crude, it is raw material. Much has to be done on it. It is a raw diamond. You have to cut it, you have to polish it, you have to give it a shape and a form. You have to give it beauty. It depends on you. If you go on carrying the raw stone, it is valueless - not only that, it will be a burden on you. It is better to throw it, better to throw it than to carry it. Why carry it unless something higher can be evolved out of it?

Always remember this: Bauls are not against sex, against lust. But they say that if you remain confined to lust, you will be lost.

Never plunge into the river of lust,you will not reach the shores. It is a river of no coasts, where typhoons rage.

What do they mean? - “the river of lust, it has no shores, and if you plunge into it you will be lost.” One has to rise above it. It is not that something is wrong in it, remember this point. Don’t conclude that Bauls are saying that something is wrong with sex. They are simply saying that the wrong arises when you are confined to it. If you can use it, if you can make a stepping-stone out of it, if you can go higher than it, then it is beautiful. It has been a great help. Without it, it would have been impossible to rise above it.

Lust in itself is like a seed: just pure possibility waiting for the right soil, waiting for the right season, waiting for the gardener, the skillful man who can help it to sprout. A seed is not actual, just potential. There is no necessity for it to become a tree. It may not ever become; it may be lost completely. If you put that seed on a stone, it will remain a seed. Ages can pass and the seed will not sprout. Many people are like that seed: those who have not found their soil yet, who have not found their right season yet. These are the worldly people. A religious person is one whose seed has reached to the right soil, and is disappearing. When the seed disappears, the tree is born. When you disappear, then the soul is born. When the soul disappears, the God is born.

You exist like the hard shell of a seed - that is the ego of man. The worldly man is the egoistic man; the nonworldly man is the humble man. By “humble” a very simple thing is meant: he is disappearing as a seed, he is ready to die into the earth. The word humble comes from humus. Humus means the earth. The humble man is one who is ready to disappear into the earth; the humble man is one who is ready to lose himself.

Jesus says again and again that if you don’t lose yourself you will not regain, if you don’t lose yourself you will never be: “Blessed are those who are ready to lose.” What does he mean? He means, blessed is the seed that loses its hard shell, becomes vulnerable, opens its soft heart to the soil so the soil can work on it, and moves into the unknown; drops the confinement of the known, drops the commitment to the known, and becomes committed to the unknown.